The wealthiest 10% Scots own 9.4 times more household wealth than the bottom 40% put together.
Jamie Livingstone, Head of Oxfam Scotland, said: "With nearly one in five people still living in poverty in Scotland, it cannot be right for the richest 1% to own more wealth than the poorest 50% put together and for income to be so unevenly shared too.
Scotland's four richest families are wealthier than the poorest 20% of the population, according to a 2015 report by Oxfam.The charity also calculated that the country's 14 wealthiest families were better off than the most deprived 30%.
There are now more people in poverty in the UK than there have been for almost 20 years and a million more than at the beginning of the decade.
At the same time, the richest 1% of the population own 20 times more wealth than the poorest 20% – nearly 13 million people – put together. Out-of-control pay ratios in the UK mean that the average pay of FTSE100 chief executives is 129 times that of the average employee. Investors’ share of UK corporate profits has also soared to 70% from 10% in the 1970s.
Oxfam recently commissioned the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics (LSE) to explore the relationship between economic inequality and poverty in the UK. Their research clearly establishes a significant and positive correlation between income inequality and income poverty in the UK over recent decades, almost irrespective of what inequality measure is used. Put simply, the data demonstrates that since 1961, when inequality has grown so too has poverty, and vice versa.
Today, more than 1 billion people around the world still live in extreme poverty. Yet recent Oxfam research shows just eight people own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion who make up the poorest half of humanity
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